NHH is a healthcare software company. We develop our software products using an agile development approach, with significant involvement of the end users, so that our products do what the end users need them to. We also follow strict design principles in our the design of our products so that our products are never a burden for the end users.

Project Description:

NHH offers and plans to offer several services to hospitals and health regions. We have strong indicators these services are proving valuable to the hospitals as well as the patients. However, we are seeking to bolster those indicators with peer-reviewed research of the effectiveness of those services. The effects we are expecting are improvements in the efficiency of the health system, as well as improved clinical outcomes for patients.

Our principle offering at present is an online health history questionnaire which is sent to patients to assess their anesthetic risk factors. These questionnaires (qnr) are used to assess whether patients need a pre-anesthetic clinic visit (PAC), where patients receive additional tests, and further education regarding their specific risk factors. We expect to see process improvements in the pre-surgical process when our qnr is used: fewer cancelled surgeries due to undiscovered health risks, better triaging at several steps in the pre-surgical journey, etc. We also expect to see better clinic outcomes, as the qnr seems to be surfacing more risk factors than the previous methods, so for instance, the risk factors have more time to be mitigated prior to surgery.

We have two other projects we begun implementing, but we are presently developing them toward a minimal viable product (MVP), so they are not in production yet. We will want similar research into the efficacy of these products, namely the efficiency gains and the improved clinical outcomes.

Background and required skills

Research Objectives/Sub-Objectives:

Show that the PAC qnr has improved the efficiency of the PAC process for patients

Show that including the PAC qnr in the PAC process improves patient outcomes